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June 18, 2015:
Revised: v2.0

Mailman? Mail? Email?

The Curse of Yahoo Email

I've been
busy over the past few months developing a bunch of new designs. A
further recent development, quite unknown to me as I'll explain, was
the publication of a design of mine for a talking frequency counter in
the March 2015 issue of the US amateur radio magazine "QST", published by ARRL.

I
submitted that material to QST for consideration about three years ago.
You'll forgive me if I didn't give it a lot of attention. Since I
currently live in the Middle East, and ARRL like to send stuff back and
forth by snail mail, I warned ARRL editors a number of times about
sending letters to me. The postal service is not reliable in this part of the world. No-one seems to believe it, but it's true.

For example, what address do
you write on the letter? Fourth sand
dune to the left of the brown camel? OK, maybe not. The problems start,
however, with the street names. They are, well,
a bit "variable", shall we say? Some folk call their street by one
name, others call it by quite
another. Even if they agree on the name, then consider the variations
in spelling those Arabic names in English. (Oh,
my word!) Finally, and as you would expect, the postal staff are much
better at
reading Arabic addresses than ones written in English. That's just
where teh problems begin, but perhaps you begin to get the idea.

Over the past six years, I've probably received perhaps ten letters,
not all in (ahem) good condition. The neighbour's brown camel has seen to a couple,
I reckon.

So when the ARRL sent me a letter telling me my article had been
published in QST, it was a minor miracle that the letter actually got to me. I think it
arrived about two months after the article was published. The letter
promised they'd be sending me a copy of the magazine. By mail. I'm not
holding out a lot of hope for that, but I'm also keeping a pretty
watchful eye over that camel next door.

Meanwhile, I was thinking that questions about that design might arrive at my email address My Callsign (at) yahoo.com but nothing happened. Huh.

Finally, realising perhaps something was wrong, I tested my email. It was then that I
discovered that Yahoo's camel had got to it. For some reason, Yahoo had
changed my email address from MyCallsign (at) yahoo.com to MyCallsign (at) yahoo.com.au. See the subtle difference? Took me a while to figure that one out.

Did Yahoo tell me? Nope. Warnings? No. Looking at my email, I could see
a date, which is not all that long ago, when email was arriving and
answers were going out jsut fine, with the correct email address from
my end added automagically, and then....Nix.

Checking around, it seems I was not the only poor soul affected by that Yahoo, er, change. Not by a long shot.

"I'll call Yahoo's Customer Care," I decided. "They'll fix it!" Ah, no.
Doesn't seem to exist. Yahoo less than helpfully point almost all of
such queries and concerns to "the community". Is that something like a
group of similarly cursed doomed souls? So, yeah, good luck with
that. After looking at a bit of that "community" email traffic, I think
I'm beginning to understand why Yahoo may not be the success it once
was.

So, rather than attempt to fix something that Yahoo's clearly not much
interested in (although I tried...Oh, how I tried...), I've simply changed my email address to a new one on my own email
server.

So, sorry, folks. Really sorry.

Feel free to use that email address to ask any questions about anything
on the website. Just note - I do have a day-job, so sometimes it may
take me a few days to answer. And I have to feed that camel. The
promised issue of QST may just turn up any day now...

Office Mail?

Ah,
I can hear someone asking out there "Why doesn't Andrew simply get his mail sent
to his office? That's a reliable method in that large Middle Eastern country."
Hmmm, let me explain.

I work for a fairly large and quite typical enterprise. Mail arrives either directly to the post office box, or
to our office building via courier, or by hand. i.e. Yes, it is quite
standard for someone to send their driver with their letter on a two
hour round trip drive across the city to this building to deliver a
letter.

Alternately, post office box mail is collected about once or
twice each month by staff in
offices like ours. It's then put in a large (very large) sack in an
office in the building. Occasionally, a handful of mail will be
pulled out and delivered to a few lucky souls, but that's quite
unusual. So, if I am expecting mail to the office, you must go to that
room,
periodically, and look in the sack. And, it's a BIG sack.

And once every couple of years, they seem to tip it out and start fresh. Don't
ask where the old mail goes. Must be a quantum thing because, as far as I can discover, it's never
seen again.

Oh, if you think using the courier is a good plan, well, good luck with
that, too.
Despite the fact our building is 15 floors high and visible across
most of the city, and next to one of the largest universities in the
Middle East, courier drivers often report being unable to find the
building. But at least they can call me for instructions.

I had one call me last week. He'd already
been given the location (It's also on the corner of two really large and well-known roads in this city)
and he had the GPS location to within 50m, but, nope, he couldn't find the building. We had this interesting
Arabic-English conversation. His native language was, I think, Urdu. I
don't speak Urdu, sorry. Sigh.

Anyway, I don't use couriers much for my own mail. I gave up on that a long
time ago. (Huh, it took a bunch of us three years to actually spot the
Main Post Office here in the city! Don't ask...) Besides, sending a
standard letter by courier from here to, say, London or New York costs
about US$100. Same cost to send couriered mail from those places to me
here too. I don't get my parts that way.

Which all explains why we don't use the mail much in the desert. Camels are way more reliable. So was email, until Yahoo.